why ; ?

[Yigal Chripun]

Joel C. Salomon wrote:
 > Yigal Chripun wrote:
>> personally I don't understand why we still use text files to represent
>> code. that's just so silly. data in a computer is stored in binary form
>> not text, so you don't get to see your "real" code anyway, but rather a
>> specific interpretation of it. and this encoding is very old and very
>> simplistic. this is identical to word for example only difference is the
>> format used by word is a different binary encoding.
> 
>  Bjarne Stroustrup had some hopes that the particular textual form of
> C++ he’d developed could be replaced with other forms that were
> conceptually identical but different syntactically. Turns out that isn’t
> quite so doable. (Though when D exposes the syntax-tree form it’s a step
> in that direction.)
> 
> —Joel

on the contrary, I've seen an article online of two people that did
exactly that. they defined an alternative syntax for C++ which is both
consistent and preserves the semantics of c++. it was their Thesis or
something like that. just stumbled on it via google.